MICHICAGO 2003
MAY 9-10, ANN ARBOR
“POLITICS, PERFORMANCE, AND THE SIGN”
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: THOMAS TURINO (U OF ILLINOIS)
FRIDAY MAY 9TH: AFTERNOON SESSION
Kuenzel Room, Michigan Union
Identity and Ethnography
3:30 Announcements and break
4:30 Keynote Address
"Music and Language Revisited"
Thomas Turino (U of Illinois)
5:30 questions
Potluck dinner at Laura Brown's house, 328 William (at Division)
SATURDAY MAY 10th
Anderson Room, Michigan Union
Institutions, Interaction, and Text
11:45 break
Multilingualism and Language Contact
1:30 lunch
Performance and Modalities
4:00 break
Language Ideologies
Dinner at the Union
Participants
Andronis, Mary Antonia. University of Chicago, Department of Linguistics
(maandron@uchicago.edu)
Language ideologies and standardization in Quichua-speaking Ecuador
Quichua (Ecuadorian Quechua) is generally regarded as being part of the Quechua II, Quechua A, or Peripheral Quechua language family along with some dialects of Northern Peru, and Ingano in Southern Colombia (Cerr�n-Palomino, 1987; Mannheim, 1991).
Within Ecuador itself, while there is one major dialectal division of Highland andLowland, there is also considerable variation among the (sub)sub-dialects of those two groups. Similiarly, there are many divisions amongst the (sometimes vastly) different Quichua-speaking communities with regards to the standardized form of the language, Quichua Unificado, or 'Unified Quichua'. While some communities have been 'revitalized' as a result, others have been alienated, citing the fact that the standard is such a marked departure from their own dialect. Additionally, just as there are historical prejudices that exist between the indigenous and non-indigenous-portions of Ecuadorian society, there are also those that exist between different Quichua-speaking communities in Ecuador. This creates two separate oppositions: one between the non-indigenous and the Quichua population as a whole, and another between the Quichua and other Quichua. Employing the semiotic processes of iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure (qua Irvine and Gal, 2000), this paper aims to address and elucidate some of the more salient sociolinguistic aspects of linguistic differentiation in Quichua-speaking Ecuador. (Figure 1is the diagrammatic representation of some of these oppositions.) In particular, this paper's emphasis will be on the ways in which the larger context of the extant (indigenous and non-indigenous) ideologies has influenced both the standardization process and the subsequent perceptions of Quichua Unificado.
Ball, Chris. University of Chicago, Departments of Linguistics and Anthropology (cgball@uchicago.edu)
Indigenous intermediaries and Piratapuya language change
The Piratapuya people of the intensely multilingual and politicized indigenous Papuri, Vaupes, and Negro rivers region of Brazil are talking about language loss and language renewal. This paper offers an analysis of interviews with politically active members of the Piratapuya Etribe_ who differ in level of grammatical competence in and identification with the Piratapuya language. Through these interviews, I situate ideologies of language change within an overall tripartite schema that (re)produces native notions of identity and history. I ground recurring metaphors of social change in local conceptions of the past and the present and movement through the landscape. I investigate the linguistic production of such discourses. Who is talking about language renewal and why? Many of the Piratapuya who have lost the language and are in positions of political power and prestige are descendants of local indigenous leaders dubbed Ecaptains_ by the
Salesian mission since the beginning of the twentieth century. These people often have an important role in mediating between the Indian and the white worlds and thus in shaping indigenous history and identity. I recognize that the conditions of authority and authenticity in the production of contemporary indigenous political discourse is historically founded. This discourse and the social actors who engage it are shaped by their particular historical conditions and this discourse and its participants in turn historicize contact, identity and alterity.
Bechter, Frank, University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology (fbechter@uchicago.edu)
Performing resistance per form: the social-dialogic composition of deaf narrative genres
Recent linguistic anthropology distinguishes "genre" and "performance" such that creative agency against "strict generic regimentation" is theorized as "resistance to hegemonic order." While distinguishing cultural form from multiplex historical implication of form is clearly fundamental, this dichotomy and valorization of its latter term risks a false dichotomy between "genre" and situation-vis-á-vis-audience -- opposing "a particular kind of text" ontologically to its "production and reception." Problematizing this orientation, I present two deaf narrative genres whose abstract textual definition fundamentally requires reference to audience and teller in tandem with the tale. Proper to a cultural formation intrinsically in dialog with non-deaf order, these forms are "études" in subverting conventional value orientations. Their strict formal regimentation epitomizes resistance to hegemonic order, far from being its antithesis. I suggest that the above view of genre vis-à-vis hegemony stems from an overarching worldview of cultures as monologic wholes (recalling classic rubrics of cultural incommensurateness), such that specific generic form and function (implicating performance) are erased in favor of a socially-absent "stylistic" definition of genre in terms of "co-occurrent formal features," whose seeming imposition can be resisted, suggesting inherent antagonism between genre and agency. My approach, relying on Bakhtin's "compositional" definition of genre (seeking a genre's overall form-functional coherence), essentially foregrounds Bakhtinian "address" as elemental to, rather than supplemental to or opposed to, generic definition. Indeed, noting other genres from my research, I show that an integrated model of deaf narrative can be constructed only through a compositional-functional orientation to genre, highlighting specific cultural-political logics.
Das, Sonia. University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology (sndas@umich.edu)
The Teaching of Heritage Languages in Montreal: The Politics and Semiotics of Emerging Language Ideologies
This paper investigates the political and semiotic mechanisms through which language ideologies in Montreal have shifted between 1977 and the present. The PELO (Programme d'Enseignement des Langues d'Origines), a government-run "heritage language program" instituted in 1978, and Bill 101, legislation introduced in 1977 that enforces the francisation of Quebec society, have played decisive roles in configuring new language ideologies. The dominant language ideology before 1977 was one in which French language-use iconically signified ethnic identity. Since the passage of Bill 101 in 1977, the French-speaking population has encompassed people of various ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds. A new language ideology, in which language use iconically signifies civic, or national identity, has largely replaced the one previously described. The PELO program, by valorizing the symbolic importance of heritage languages for certain minorities living in Montreal, reinforces the ideological foundation upon which an iconic link between ethnic identity and heritage language can develop. The emergence of new labels, such as Québécois de veille souche and Québécois-Vietnamien, to refer to distinctions within the French-speaking population signal this ongoing semiotic process. In this paper I will consider the shifts in reactions of parents, teachers, leaders of ethnic community organizations, government officials, participants of the PELO, and academics toward the PELO. Generalized transitions in people's responses, from highlighting issues of social inequality resulting from the program to primarily considering its pedagogical attributes and from questioning to accepting the program's underlying multicultural ideology, support the conclusion that the PELO has effectively promoted new ways of thinking about language and social identity in Montreal.
Durston, Alan. University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology (atdursto@uchicago.edu)
Linguistic heterogeneity (code-mixing) in early Catholic texts in Quechua
This paper is an attempt to make sense of linguistic heterogeneity, understood as the use of unassimilated lexical and grammatical forms from languages other than that of the text in question, in the 16th- and 17th-century missionary literature in Quechua. This literature developed from a canonical corpus of texts produced by the Third Lima Council (1582-83), which imposed a pastoral lingua franca based on the Cuzco dialect as the sole official medium of vernacular catechesis and liturgy among all speakers of Quechua languages and dialects. Beyond the necessary incorporation of a large number of Spanish loanwords for Christian concepts and institutions, there is a strong element of
dialectal purism in this corpus. Post-council missionary authors were clearly constrained to remain within the broad parameters of this lingua franca. However, many of their sermons, hymns and sacramental texts feature Central Quechua words and suffixes in alternation with their lingua franca equivalents, as well as terms from the sacred languages of Christianity which were not functioning as loanwords or as quotations. In some cases, it appears that the foreign elements were introduced for figurative purposes. A typology of the kinds of linguistic heterogeneity that occur in these texts is proposed (e.g., deliberate or not, for poetic effect or for enhanced intelligibility...). Finally, I discuss the implications of these cases for understandings of cross- cultural translation programs and colonial language politics in this and other historical contexts.
Herron, James. University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology (jherron@umich.edu)
The Metapragmatics of Neoliberalism: Indigenous Struggle and Shadow
Conversations in the Colombian Agrarian Bank
This paper explores how petty government bureaucrats and indigenous clients of the Colombian Agrarian Bank (Caja Agraria) mutually negotiate their identities in the context of face-to-face interactions. Attending closely to the recursive embeddings of participation frameworks in the encounters, I argue that such shifts are systematically patterned in ways that finally project an image of the Colombian state as a coherent, neutral, and depoliticized entity standing apart from the political struggles and demands
of indigenous people. The specific interactive constructions of the state in the encounters, I suggest, are closely linked to the deeply contradictory relationship of indigenous communities and the neoliberal state in contemporary Colombia.
Hibbard, Stephen. University of Chicago, Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics
(s-hibbard@uchicago.edu)
Linguistic Differentiation in "Iconic Communities"
If the ultimate objective of nation-state building and linguistic standardization is sociocultural homogenization and the suppression of optional variation in language, that objective may be achieved through the production of radical difference in a subset of the population and the reproduction and, indeed, intensification of variation in their language. That is to say, the discourses and practices of nationalism may themselves construct "iconic communities," whose idealized difference grounds contemporary processes of homogenization for the majority. In Poland, the Tatra Highlanders have been figured as living embodiments of ideal Polishness, and their linguistic variety--Highland Polish--as a repository of archaic, authentic Polish speech. The recruitment of Highland Polish into Polish nationalist discourses has been a central feature in the wider ideological construal of the Tatra Highlanders as ideal Poles. I will show how the nation-state-level logic that iconizes Highland speech has been re-articulated at the local level via the construction of an ideologically archaic performance variety of Highland Polish. This performance variety is today on display in contemporary artistic competitions, poetry readings, and storytelling performances. As the locus of local "best speaker-hood," it has, further, taken on certain of the characteristics of a regional standard. I thus explore one way in which nation-state-level ideologies (in this case, a reflex of the search for the ethnolinguistically conceptualized "folk") trickle down to the local level, with effects that include investigable linguistic differentiation.
Hoffmann, Erika. University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology (eghoffma@umich.edu)
Innovation, Standardization, and Identity: The Development of Nepali Sign Language
Nepal's deaf community is currently working to construct a Deaf national identity, believing that signers, by virtue of the shared biological feature of deafness, should be considered an ethnic minority group within the country. This would allow Deaf identity to trump other relevant markers of identity, allowing deaf individuals to opt out of the disadvantaged social position they have often held. However, the effect of other identity markers on relations in the deaf community are not absent - the dominant social groups' power is heavily reflected in the signs that become part of the standard Nepali Signed Language. Yet, because the number of standardized signs remains quite small, actual signing practice in Nepal draws heavily on non-standard signs and involves a great deal of cooperatively co-constructed signs which may allow signers the freedom to allow their communicative practice to reflect who they are (or want to be) at any given point in time. Thus, as an ethnically deaf identity is in the process of being forged, the interplay between the larger social field and the internal politics of the deaf community are reflected and refracted in both the signs included in the standardized signed language and those which, while not standard, are nevertheless a part of signing practice. I propose a project that would explore, via a study of the emerging sign practices in Nepal, the relationship between language use and identity formation, in a situation in which both are undergoing a period of pronounced fluidity.
Jones, Jeremy and Pfeil, Gretchen. University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology
(jayeljay@uchicago.edu,, pfeil@uchicago.edu)
An Informant: H.K. Banda and the institutional history of Chichewa
The paper examines the relationship between the Boasian linguistic project and language planning in Malawi's nation-building process. In our investigation of the development of the ideological construction of the Malawian nation we are faced with a seeming parallelism in the biography of a single man, Hastings Kamuzu Banda and the "biography" of a named indigenous language variety, Chichewa. In 1933, Mark Hanna Watkins, a student in the University of Chicago Anthropology Department, completed a dissertation entitled: _Chichewa--Language of British Central Africa_. The production of
this grammar was supervised by Edward Sapir. In keeping with Sapir's prior work and contemporary methodological standards in linguistic anthropology, Watkins drew on the expertise of a single native speaker, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, then also a student at University of Chicago. Banda's incipient nationalism in this period was more fully developed in the era of decolonization, when he became dean of a generation of African nationalists, and the first (later "life") president of Malawi. In the first years of Malawian independence, Banda instituted a policy of language purification, which transformed ChiChewa from its imagined place as a minority dialect of ChiNyanja into the official "indigenous" language of the country. In addition to sketching the historical scene in Chicago and Malawi surrounding these events, the paper questions the ways in which the
methodological conventions of Saussurian/Bloomfieldian linguistics have intersected with "indigenous" models of relationships between language and political authority.
Lange, Patricia G. University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology
(pgonzal@umich.edu)
Identity Performance and Disruption on the Internet
Participants in online groups often use sociolinguistic strategies to perform their affiliation to certain beliefs, values, and ideologies popular in technical communities. For example, a participant may praise the importance of Netiquette in order to construct his identity as someone who is knowledgeable about "correct" or normative online forms of
expression. Importantly, such a public display does more than construct an individual identity as "expert." The performance also helps to create an imaginary group of like-minded individuals to which the performer wishes to align himself. Yet, as Goffman points out, a performance is a "delicate, fragile thing that can be shattered by very minor mishaps" (Goffman 1959: 56). This paper examines data from two online communities
in which participants mentor each other with respect to computer technologies and related social behavior. The data show that participants may interrupt another's attempt to display their expertise by questioning, challenging or attacking a particular performance. The attacked participant often responds with an improvisation meant to recoup the techno-social capital lost during the disruption. The contention here is that performers often respond to the high-pressure demands of performance disruptions by offering stereotypical views on technology and techno-social culture. The continual re-animation of such stereotypes eventually concretizes these views as normative (whether or not they
originally were), thus making non-normative expression more difficult. Within and across interactions, such stereotypical expressions become reified as techno-cultural norms even though they are better seen as improvisational responses to performance disruptions that threaten to decrease a participant's techno-social capital.
Mawyer, Alexander Dale. University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology (admawyer@midway.uchicago.edu)
Procreation as Predication: Performance Anxiety as Ontology in Eastern Polynesia
Numerous recent works in Eastern Polynesian anthropology and linguistics have found themselves embroiled in a controversy over the cognitive representations of reality's structure supposed to be inherent in Polynesian languages and the subjective experience of being Polynesian supposed to be, in part, a function of those representations. Inspired in part by a number of other recent works by indigenous anthropologists approaching the question of being Polynesian through 'native' epistemologies and ontologies, this presentation examines aspect and the status of the verb/noun and consequent issues of Polynesian 'being' through an address of the ontology implicit in several key procreation/foundation myths, songs, prayers and sem@ntic reconstructions drawn from available lexicons and recent fieldwork on the island of Mangareva in far-eastern Polynesia--a small western Polynesian archipelago approximately half-way between Tahiti and Easter Island).
Nozawa, Shunsuke. University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology (snozawa@uchicago.edu)
Extend yourself: 'writing' and 'glossing,' or the entitlement of histories
The paper discusses semiosis in Japanese inscriptional practices ('writing'). We may situate such semiosis, always embedded in an intersection of discursive interactions, language ideologies, and semiotic technologies, in the context in which text-artifacts receive some sort of 'glossing' (or 'recipe'-like stipulation) in various modalities. The paper will highlight three such modalities in particular, using Japanese examples: 1) denotationally oriented 'how-to-phonate' gloss (rubi/furigana [typographical]convention) 2) indexical-iconically oriented 'how-to-imitate' gloss (calligraphy 'dictionary') 3) historiographically oriented 'how-to-live-in-history' gloss (jibunshi, or 'self' history, writing manual). The semiosis that underlies these examples operates in setting up some
intensionalizeable universe of type-level representation and then in an extensionalizing move that points to text-artifacts as tokens of such representation. In this process there may be observed a process of "entitlement" (Burke), semiotic form that summarizes or 'names' a discursive event. The 'self' history example in particular shows how inscriptional practices as involving the entitling of historical events (whereby events acquire some thingyness) relate to a political economy of entitlement - right - to discourses. Such an economy concerns how the relationship between personhood, groupness, and history is mediated through the organizing of text- artifactual semiosis under socio-economico-historical conditions of late twentieth century Japan, especially within an economy that focuses on personal customization that confers on commodities an heirloom-like quality. The 'writers' of personal history come to secure their inhabiting of and right to a 'place' in history - that they do exist (that is, are extendable beings) in the world of social relations - through the work of entextualization of life.
Paz, Alejandro. University of Chicago, Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics
(aipaz@uchicago.edu)
Reporting Divine Speech: Latin American Evangelical Christians and the Constitution of Spiritual Selves
Several studies of Evangelical Christian language ideologies have, first of all, discussed the importance for believers to speak from a properly constituted interior or spiritual self, that communicates with the divine being. The exterior or material self must demonstrate its discipline to this spiritual side in order for a person's words to be deemed divinely
inspired by other believers. Secondly, these studies have argued that believers constitute their actions--through such recognizable speech genres as "testimony"--as if guided by biblical precedence or prophecy, and thus contextualize narrated events within a biblical spacetime.This paper will build on these studies, while examining more carefully how
these two effects are produced in the ritual performance of Latin American Evangelicals who live in Israel. In particular, I will consider the roles of reported speech in producing evidence of a well-constituted interior. First, reported speech plays a central role in testimonies as believers narrate their interactions with God. Second, direct reports of and renvoies to biblical verses are a vital manner for signalling a register once described tome as "speaking with the Bible." By considering Evangelical language ideologies in light of work on reflexive language and registers, this paper will explore the dialectic between reported speech, register, and authority in ritual performances.
Perry, Tam. University of Michigan, School of Social Work and Department of Anthropology (teperry@umich.edu)
Fading to the background: Language ideology and the discursive practices of older persons
This paper employs theories of language ideology to understanding professional caregiving of older persons, specifically in nursing homes. It explores how beliefs about language may shape both service provision and academic research perspectives. The paper provides an analysis of an academic text describing communication between caregivers and clients. The paper considers the implications of power and hierarchy between these two groups. Also, the paper reveals how assumptions of expertise attributed to the service providers contribute to communicative interaction. Lastly, the paper will examine the role of researchers in perpetuating language ideologies.
Rodr�guez, Rosa. University of Chicago, Department of Linguistics
(rmrodrig@midway.uchicago.edu)
Spiraling into control: codeswitching in a K'iche' Mayan campaign speech
Many approaches to codeswitching center on speaker intentions, and on the idea that each switch is associated with one specific meaning (Stroud 1992, 1998). I examine this assumption through a close analysis of a variety of linguistic strategies, including codeswitching in a K'iche' Maya community. The data for this paper are taken from the mayoral campaign speech that the incumbent candidate of Cantel, Guatemala, delivered during his tour of the town's rural communities. In order to maximize his appeal with the audience and win their support, the mayor uses a variety of linguistic resources, including reported speech, language and register choice, and style variation. The complexity of his
relationship to the audience(s) is evidenced in his speech, particularly when he discusses potentially compromising subject matter. He shapes this relationship through an astute deployment of his discursive repertoire, which works not according to neat correlations between 'code' and 'we/they' identities or 'theme', but through subtle and cumulative layerings of their indexical values (Silverstein 1996).Two things are suggested by the data: (a) aspects of style, register and language choice are not necessarily mapped in a sequential or one-to-one fashion to indexical 'targets' such as topic, speaker/interlocutor identity or other contextual features; and (b) the meanings of different socioindexical
effects are not only mediated by local ideologies, but also progressively build on and influence one another as discursive 'interaction' unfolds.
Sicoli, Mark. University of Michigan, Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics
(msicoli@umich.edu)
Functions of voice quality in a Zapotec region of Oaxaca
Speakers of Zapotec from several small towns in southwestern Oaxaca are adept at performing conventional voice qualities, which serve to contextualize their speech, deferring to an authoritative social relationship where a demonstration of respect is required, or, creating an authoritative relationship between the participants of a speech event. This paper provides a description of the voice qualities of Falsetto Voice (high-pitched voice), Murmured Voice, and Breathy Voice as they interact with grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic features of Coyachila Zapotec language and discourse. In this talk I will focus on the semeiotic properties of prosodic signs (non-segmental signs) that are bound in temporal contiguities with the segmental structure of words and phrases. The work is based on instrumental analysis of language data gathered through field trips in Oaxaca between 1997 and 2002, where I conducted linguistic interviews, recorded narrative dialogues, and participated in and observed natural settings of speech.
Skjon, E. Lee. University of Chicago, Departments of Anthropology & Linguistics (els@uchicago.edu)
Region, Deixis, and Identitarian Enactments
Without question, ethnic identity has emerged as the crucible of Africa's contemporary political condition, with variation in language use typically its clearest marker. Consequently, most analyses of modern African politics, culture, and communication have concentrated on the relationship between ethnic groups and their languages on the one hand, and nation-state polities and official languages on the other. However, in Mozambique's devastating civil war (1975-92) and divisive postwar elections, which have pitted the central provinces against those in the north and south, the importance of regionalism has been underscored as a decisive precondition for a politicized ethnolinguistic consciousness. This paper thus re-situates analysis of state-ethnic relations within the 'mid-level' socio-political domain of the region. As a case study, I focus on the Mwani, a Swahili Muslim group of fisherfolk and merchants who exist precisely at the margin of one such regional reticulation and territorial logic, in northern Mozambique just south of Tanzania. I show (1), how intra-ethnic differences in class, gender, generation, and other sociological categories co-vary not only with differences in language use but also with diverse modes of representing and enacting identity in quotidian and spirit/religious discourses and practices, and (2), that the relations among regionally defined, contiguous localities are the most determinant of these internal differences, as well as local manifestations of the state. I thus challenge Africanist scholarship that has treated the language and culture of ethnic groups as unitary and isomorphic entities with uniform and uniformly subordinate relations to those of modern bureaucratic states.
Slotta, James. University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology.
(jslotta@uchicago.edu)
Authenticity in the archive: voicing the Inuit past in the High Arctic Relocation controversy
While historical evidence maintained in archival institutions has long been seen as an authoritative source in the writing of history, recent claims for the recognition of distinctive cultural modes of preserving and telling history have raised questions about the evidentiary status of oral and archival sources in aboriginal claims to rights and reparations in Canada. Although it has been argued that recognizing oral histories as evidence in aboriginal claims is a necessary correlate of the recognition due to aboriginal peoples in a multicultural state, the ways in which oral histories can be used to justify
historical claims remain uncertain. This paper will discuss a set of histories written between 1984 and 1996 concerning the relocation of Inuit families from Northern Quebec to the High Arctic in the 1950s. These histories, written to help decide the truth of relocatees' claims of mistreatment in this event, came to widely different conclusions, not only about what really happened, but about the appropriateness of sources and their interpretation. This paper will discuss these arguments about the value of oral and archival evidence as they reveal different conceptualizations of the contexts in which this evidence was and is situated. How are various culturalized and historicized types of author recognized in the archival documents and oral histories? How are the various ways in which this evidence was transmitted from past to present seen to give it value? And, in what contexts are authors understood to be authentically voicing themselves?
Smid, Karen. University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology (ksmid@umich.edu)
Inventing the Inventors: Scholastic Writing on African Orthographic Origins
From the 1830s-1930s, several cases of West African people inventing orthographies for writing in indigenous languages attracted scholarly attention. Investigations of these cases were undertaken by missionary-affiliated linguists, many of whom devoted consideration in their written work to what they presumed to be the local myth about each
orthography's origination. Although accounts of these myths were produced by researchers working in a variety of geographically-dispersed locations, there are notable similarities across versions. Most often, the orthography's inventor was a rebellious male youth who, in a dream or vision, was divinely inspired to develop a system for writing in his native language. Afterwards, over an extended period of time, the youth worked diligently, in seclusion or with friends, to develop an orthography to resemble the writing
he remembered from his dream, and this orthography was later adopted by others in his community. The origin myths were arguably more invented than represented by European scholars in their writing, despite some trivial attempts to rhetorically project the myths onto African people. Laying aside questions about the potential historical presence of such myths among Africans, questions arise about the textual presence of the myths in published writing by Europeans, many of whom were missionary-affiliated scholars of linguistics. How did these scholars write about divine intervention in relation to the creation of these orthographies? What ideological purposes did these orthographic origin myths serve in their published writing? To explore these questions, this paper will discuss three discursive strategies through which the origin myths enabled scholars to evade aspects of the orthographic invention cases that would have directly challenged assumptions about Africans as passive and inferior. In short, these discursive strategies yielded a body of scholarly literature on the African-invented orthographies that strategically to fails to fully recognize them as such.
Thiels, John. University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology. (jthiels@umich.edu)
Locating an Elite style choice in the Bilingual Nation: On claiming not to speak Guarani in Paraguay
Paraguay is home to a historically-attested phenomenon of widespread bilingualism in Guarani and Spanish, dubbed "national bilingualism" by Rubin (1968). In recent census data, only six percent of Paraguayans claimed to be monolingual in Spanish. Some Paraguayans who are quite competent in Guarani will deny competence and align themselves with the cosmopolitanism and modernity associated with Spanish, thereby problematizing their position vis-a-vis the bilingual nation.
Thompson, Greg. University of Chicago, Committee on Human Development
(gathomps@uchicago.edu)
Talking "black" to teachers: middle-class, suburban, white adolescent high school boys' use of racially marked phrases
In a retrospective study of the language practices of middle-class, white, suburban high school boys, I investigate how language taken from African-American sources was used by these adolescents at a suburban high school. In the first section of the paper, I explore the nature of the relevant indexicalities of this code-as-sign. I examine this issue in two respects. First, I ask whether my informants' use of this language references the more specific context of "rap" or a more general context of "blackness." Next, I ask, does it index a discourse of resistance, or does it index an ideology of linguistic disorder? To answer these two questions I offer evidence that the contexts in which this language practice are used do not call up images of rap and resistance, but rather images of the category of African-Americans while at the same time presupposing linguistic disorder. Finally, I consider how this language practice is used to author a "cool" yet intelligent white identity through Bakhtin's notion of "double-voicing," wherein my informants identify themselves with positively valenced aspects of "blackness" through the use of "black talk" while simultaneously distancing themselves from negatively valenced aspects through lexical and pragmatic parody. In closing I discuss the potential utility as well as the limitations of the research method used.
Wolfgram, Matthew. University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology
(wolfm@gwu.edu)
Translating into modernity: On the postcolonial institutionalization of "Indian medicine"
In an effort to meet the health care needs of the emerging postcolonial nation-state, India's scientific elite employed translation as a means of synthesizing the medical knowledge of Western and indigenous paradigms (Ayurvedic and Unani) into a singular "Indian medical system." The institutionalization of translation as a discourse genre and as a mediator of historical action involved regimenting the indexical link between the "original" and "translation." I describe three semiotic processes employed by medical nationalists to ideologize the indexical relationship of Sanskrit and English medical terminology. (1) The original is semantically encompassed by the translation (Benjamin 1969) which, as Indian scientists struggled to include bio-medicine within the languages of Ayurveda and Unani, led to the transformation of the sense of indigenous categories. (2) This ecompasment is unidirectional (Asad 1986; Jakobson 1959) in that the translation is invariably from "indigenous" into "Western" lexicons. (3) Translation involves the projection of relationships of equivalence and inequivalence between discourse units, the criteria for which are conventional and not based on any inherent properties of the linguistic codes (Goodman 1972; Quine 1969). Indian medicine was constructed through such ideological projections in which some Ayurvedic and Unani medical terms are conceptualized as the same as the categories of "Western science," whereas others are believed to be untranslatable. I argue that the semiotic processes that were mobilized in this translation activity consistently re-centered Western medicine as the paragon of scientific modernity.
